Tom was anxious to have the conversation move upon firmer ground. He was also in the dark as to what the next move in the campaign was to be.
Was it to be abandoned, or were they to try and carry on? The latter possibility seemed too fearful. How could he go into that room again? But one must proceed cautiously. It would never do, for example, to come out and treat the whole thing as a distinctly juvenile performance, something they had quite outgrown, until it was clear that they had outgrown it. Again, now was not the time to explain the real nature of his lecture. He could do that when the whole thing had become an amusing memory. "What are we going to do about Mr. Sprig?" asked Tom vaguely.
"You mean are we going to keep on with the lectures?"
"Well, yes."
"What do you think? Last night I was so sick about the whole thing that I was ready to give it all up, but now I wonder if it isn't our duty to give it one more trial." Her words were disappointing, but the dispirited tone in which she said them was cheering, and Tom made so bold as to sing the lately revived "Duty, duty must be done, the rule applies to everyone, and painful though the duty be, to shirk the task were fiddle-dee-dee..."; a happy impulse, for when Henry arrived from his five o'clock he found Tom at the piano and Nancy sitting by him, the one in the rôle of the Mikado of Japan and the other as his daughter-in-law-elect.
When, however, on the following Tuesday they again climbed down from the fourth floor of the Whitman building, the light had indeed gone out of the undertaking. Mr. Sprig's subject, the digestive and excretory tracts, had not been a propitious one for so critical a time. Leofwin, who had invited himself along, had been captivated by the decorative possibilities of the alimentary canal and had led the discussion following the lecture with a vigour and thoroughness trying for those unfamiliar with an artist's training. "Don't you think it might be fun to trace something all the way from the initial bite down?" he asked. "Let's take an olive, a green olive. 'Back to Nature by A. Green Olive: A Drama in Six Acts and any Number of Scenes.'"
Tom was looking intently at the diagrams on the walls. At musical comedies and the movies, when embarrassing situations arose, one was, in a measure, prepared. The darkness, too, helped, and one could stare straight ahead until the relief, which was rarely long in coming, arrived. There was, finally, the comfort of numbers. But now they were only two—the artist and the scientist being immune to shame. It was, furthermore, extremely bright, everybody was out in the open, and although the amateurs had come prepared for a momentary brush with a bowel or two, they had no reason to expect a prolonged causerie upon even more intimate matters. Tom was, accordingly, hot with embarrassment, and he had reason to believe that Nancy was also.
As Leofwin rattled on, with frankness ever more Elizabethan, Tom glanced at Nancy. She was examining the point of her pencil with as elaborate an interest as he had ever seen shown in any object. It seemed an altogether remarkable affair; but then, apparently, so was the eraser. They were complementary. A line could be made by the point, a delicate, straight line; and then, reversing the pencil, the line could be taken out by the eraser. The thing was complete.
Tom became angry. What right had that great calf to subject Nancy to such an ordeal? He turned to her and said without lowering his voice, "This is rather dull, don't you think? Let's go out and see the hens."
They went out, but couldn't very well see the hens, since they had no candle and were above deceiving them with the porch light. Accordingly, they stepped back into the little hallway that led to the library. To go on into the library was to expose themselves again to the mortification of the physiological vagaries of Leofwin. So they just stood in the little hallway. And then, they laughed.